5 not-so-secret strategies to improve your employer brand voice

Guest writer: Richard Pain

Having a distinct and consistent employer brand voice is one of the keys to enhancing your employer brand awareness, recall, and positivity. Achieving this requires a well-thought-through employer brand voice guide, however, these documents are often produced more with the brand in mind rather than the writers who need to interpret them. This can lead to copy that misses the mark, goes through lots of rounds of edits, and eats up everybody’s time.  

The trick to improving your employer brand voice guide is viewing it from the user’s perspective. This isn’t a secret, it’s just that the stakeholders who produce these guides are typically too close to the brand to see it with fresh eyes. This can be managed, however, with the following 5 tips: 

Keep it succinct 

Employer brand voice guidelines are largely meant to be instructional. Sure, you can have an introduction explaining your vision, mission and core values, but when it comes to writing, executives need to be able to scan through the document and interpret your instructions easily.  

So, for the bulk of your guidelines, do not write using long paragraphs. These will obscure your instructions rather than provide nuance. Instead, write using short, direct, sentences (two or three at most) that leave little to interpretation. Make ample use of subheadings, bullet points, and a clear layout which logically divides your document's sections. 

Doing this can be a challenge, after all, it’s easier to ramble on at length, but keeping your guidelines succinct will make them easier to interpret and apply.  

Include dos and don’ts with examples 

Don’t just explain what you want, state what you don’t want and include examples. Just stating what you’re looking for isn’t enough, and without examples, your instructions are liable to be misinterpreted. For example, what constitutes “positive” for one person may appear “excitable” to another. Stating what you don’t want provides writers with guardrails, ensuring they do not go too far in any one direction. 

Another useful example is to show the kind of generic text that you want to avoid, and then show how it should be written according to your brand voice. These examples should be for the same type of writing, for example, a display ad, an email or a social post. The more realistic your examples are, the more useful they’ll be.  

Get feedback from your end users 

Ask the people who use your employer brand voice guidelines what they think about it. Was it easy to follow? What would they add, or what would they change? 

Ideally, these conversations will be had during the creation of the document, but over time, different people will use the guidelines who may have valuable feedback. These could be people from different countries, cultures or language backgrounds. Or perhaps there’s a new digital platform your guide needs to provide advice for. 

Without checking in with the stakeholders using your document, you’ll be missing the chance to check whether your employer brand voice guidelines are still fit for purpose. Which brings us to the next point … 

Maintain a living document 

Most companies create their employer voice guidelines and leave them the same for years until there’s a significant rebranding. This misses the opportunity to incorporate learnings from end-user feedback and past projects. Instead, make your guidelines a living document, making additions and amendments as required. 

Depending on the size of your organisation, this can appear a daunting task, since big changes may require lots of rounds of approvals. If this applies to you, stick to edits that improve clarity such as making instructions clearer and including better examples.  

Has somebody recently produced copy that nails the brief? Did a writer do something unintentionally wrong that can be advised against the next time? If so, and if you feel it will help your end users, add it to your guide.  

When doing so, remember not to overcomplicate your guide (see tip 1: keep it succinct). So, keep amendments minor, and in the case of examples, update existing ones or add them to an appendix.  

Include a style guide 

While your employer brand voice guidelines explain your voice, a style guide explains the little details of writing. Do you use American or British English? Which currency do you use? Grammar, punctuation, etc.  

A style guide is essential to helping your writers deliver clean, consistent copy across all channels, and it’ll save your editors lots of time in the long term. If you don’t already have one, you don’t have to start from scratch. Many companies have their style guides available online which you can use as a template and adapt accordingly. 

Just like your employer brand voice guide, your style guide needs to be succinct, clearly laid out, and updated as necessary.   

Conclusion 

If you’re not doing so already, applying these five tips should result in a marked improvement in the clarity and consistency of your employer brand voice, helping your brand stand out from the competition and win the battle for talent. 

Takeaways

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Guest writer

Richard Pain is the founder of Storyteller Strategies, a content marketing agency specialising in business, tech and sustainability-related content. He has produced employer branding resources for a wide variety of clients and regularly writes for the BBC, Bloomberg, NBCUniversal and SPH.

Storyteller Strategies

Storyteller Strategies is a content marketing agency based in Asia specialised in business, technology and sustainability content. With written content, videos, podcasts and more, we help companies tell their story effectively.

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